Marc David Baer is a professor of history at the London School of Economics. “For the past 10 years,” he wrote recently, “I have taught a seminar… titled ‘Muslim-Jewish Relations: History and Memory in the Middle East and Europe.’ Many of the students are young Jewish or Muslim men and women from London, who grew up among the other group and have a desire to learn more about them.”
Given how few knew about the similarities between the two religions and the intimate rivalries and cooperation of the past, Baer would tell them that it was not right to depict relations between Jews and Muslims in a negative way, nor was it correct that the last century of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been representative of the past.
Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations grew out of his teaching work. His objective was to tell the true story of the relationship between Jews and Muslims from the seventh to the 21st century. The book covers 1,415 years – from around 610, when Muslims say that Mohammed began to preach, to today – in the Middle East and in Europe.
In this deeply researched work, Baer argues against two dominant myths: that the past history of the Jewish-Muslim relationship is a sort of interfaith utopia or that it is a story of perpetual enmity.
His goal is to recount what he describes as “the unknown, forgotten, or purposely buried story of the connected histories of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and Europe from their earliest relations in Arabia to relations in the Middle East and Europe today.”
What was needed, he writes, “is a retelling of their relations without myth and counter-myth.”
The author asserts that over the centuries the same themes repeatedly emerge, such as Jewish-Muslim religious and secular symbiosis; the rise of elite Jews to positions of wealth and influence and their subsequent fall as Muslims perceived a violation of the dhimma protection pact; the triangular relation with Christians, which worsens Jewish-Muslim relations; and the political use of myth and counter-myth obscuring that history.
Baer does not obscure the reality of the present position
Although Muslims and Jews have engaged one another, sometimes for better, sometimes not, for over 1,400 years, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict means that most discussions of Jewish-Muslim relations now focus on the worst aspects of the relationship.
Baer exemplifies the difficulty that, unfortunately, sometimes arises when attempting even-handedness. It can obscure the truth and foster new myths of its own.
In discussing Hamas’s barbarous pogrom of October 7, 2023, Baer provides a detailed account of how they “beat, gang, raped, and murdered” more than 1,200 Israelis. “The victims,” he writes, “included babies, children, women, and the elderly,” and he refers to the over 250 hostages who were assaulted and abducted to the Gaza Strip.
When describing Israel’s response, he writes of bombing which, in the first month, he claims, “killed an estimated 10,000 Palestinians, perhaps half of whom were children.” After two years, he continues, “at least 67,000 had been killed, an estimated four-fifths of whom were civilians, although we do not know how many were Hamas fighters. Israeli forces targeted hospitals, convoys of ambulances, schools, and refugee camps.”
Extraordinarily, Baer makes no mention of the vast subterranean network of tunnels, larger than the London Underground, that Hamas had created beneath Gaza, nor that the entrances and exits to them were concealed within hospitals, schools, mosques, and private homes.
He makes no acknowledgment of the reality that, to attack the Hamas enemy, the IDF had no alternative but to target the buildings in which the tunnel entrances and exits were situated and in which the Hamas fighters were embedded.
Nor does Baer address the fact that Hamas-run and UN-cited statistics count everyone under 18 as “children,” even though Hamas has recruited boys as young as 14 for military youth programs.
Hamas-provided statistics on child deaths – which are widely cited by the United Nations and media – have been sharply criticized by independent analysts for likely inflation and for misclassifying both ages and combatant status.
Baer does not engage with subsequent criticism of Hamas casualty lists, including analyses by independent researchers who argue that the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures have at times combined genuine war deaths with deaths from natural causes such as illness and old age, a problem partially acknowledged by Gaza officials in later “cleanup” revisions.
Baer gives substance to genocide accusations despite attempts to avoid bias
Thus, Baer, while striving to avoid bias, nevertheless gives substance to the accusations against Israel of genocide.
Elsewhere in the volume, Baer’s account of events in the Gaza war – which have yet to be impartially assessed – could be used to bolster charges against Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On a positive note, he points out that on the first anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom against the Gaza-area communities, the UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, then-archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and then-chair of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) Qari Asim jointly condemned both “the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel” and the “devastating war in Gaza.”
In line with his admirable purpose in producing this work, Baer quotes the three religious leaders’ declaration rejecting “those who seek to divide us. Anti-Jewish hate and anti-Muslim hate have no place in the UK today,” they asserted. “We must stand together against prejudice and hatred in all its forms.”
In Children of Abraham, Baer rejects both the myth of an interfaith golden age and the view from the other end of the spectrum of relentless Muslim-Jewish violence and persecution. Jewish and Muslim relations, he maintains, “span the spectrum of human interaction from love and friendship to hate and violence.”
Baer provides his readers with a full history of the complex Jewish-Muslim relationship from the moment that Islam emerged as a religion from its Judeo-Christian biblical origins. He ranges widely for his source material, and it is all recorded in the 69 pages of references appended to his text.
The work as a whole is an invaluable guide toward understanding one of the key issues of modern times – the antagonism that has become embedded between the Jewish and the Muslim worlds.
The French have a saying: “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner” (to understand all is to forgive all). Baer’s work may help many on that journey.
The reviewer is a former senior civil servant. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com
Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
By Marc David Baer
Basic Books
496 pages; $27
